titancity

( Peter's new, new soapbox )

June14: Summer has come again.

2011sept08 - Hum's it's 2 years later, it's Autumn again.... as you can guess, this website doesn't exactly have my full attention.

A bit of ranting. First the nutty part of environmentalism, fx. in teh form of 'black google'. - http://www.blackgoogle.net/ - quote: "Monitors displaying predominantly black colours use around 20% less energy than those displaying a predominantly white screen. By using this special black search page instead of the default white service, you will be saving energy and doing your bit for the environment every time you search the internet."
True for CRT and OLED monitors, false for backlit TFTs - the most widely used monitor type by consumers and businesses today - because the backlight is always on at a constant output power; what you see in the monitor is actually what the TFT panel that sits between you and the light source, allows to be filtyered through. However, all this is irrelevant since most browsers use a search bar which totally overrides the google front page (or whatever search engine you use). For the few that don't use the search bar, unless you are a very slow typist or slow to decide what to type in the Search box, you're not going to spend much time on the search page. There are good hints on how to save power/energy, but this is just nutty. Oh, and isn't 'black google' racist? (PC crowd, go nuts);P eBay handed aff Skype at a bit more than half the original price. The Pirate Bay deal with GGF is definitively drowned now, as GGF was tossed off the Stockholm stock exchange, thus without possibility of acquiring funding (which is really what a stock exchange does for companies).

It's the First of September (2009 -ed), which means according to the Almanac it's AUTUMN! So what's going on in the world? In short...

ThePirateBay deal is a mess. GlobalGamingFactory who was supposed to buy TPB haven't been able to raise the money for the deal, and trading of their stock on the exchange was suspended on the 21st of August due to suspicions of insider trading; it seems now that the Pirate Bay deal was a bluff to bolster the wallet of Hans Padeya, theGGF owner. Most of GGF's board has jumped ship, not only because Pandeya seems to have made up a few false stories to boost GGF's outlook (such as the involvement of the Napster founder John Fanning), but also since Padeya have borrowed cash from them to acquire GGF stock for, cash which now seems to be gone. If the seeming trickery is true, it is a damn shame, because Pandeya has made some quite valid points about the nature of bittorrent and the way the future will be if p2p distribution will be assumed to be of a dubious nature per default; in short, that Big Brother hates file sharing. He wrote a manifesto of sorts, that you can read here: http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2009/08/manifest.pdf

In the midst of the hubbub, TPB was shut down brieftly on the 25th of August when the international copyright stooges had the Stockholm court shut down, not TPB itself, and not their ISP, but instead went for their ISP's ISP (Black Internet), that is the backbone provider. As the TPB crew correctly points out, this is like outlawing production of asphalt to combat speeding. Whether or not the charges of bribing the court officials is true, is unknown. Black Internet has also been subject to equipment sabotage that has seemingly cost them a large sum in lost business, as they serve a number of other customers than just TPB's upstream provider.

Peerialism, a Peer-to-Peer technology developer which was ironically also involved in GGF's trickery, has announced a more efficient Bittorrent tracker system, which will accellerate file transfers by using what has been dubbed "P4P" methods, that is, for the peer system to choose geographically close peers for transfers.

On the 28th of Agust, Apple released OS X 10.6 aka "Snow Leopard" (upgrade price 29 US$), which is one piece of news in a flurry of OS activity from all such producers. Microsoft has labored to get their Windows 7 (aka Vista attempt #2), and they are trying to sucker in people to stay on their bloated platform with two months of free use before having to register. (My comment is that it is the usual drug dealer tactics - the first fix is always free). Debian developers have outlined the changes in the upcomign released 6.0, and Ubuntu is at Karmic Koala alpha 4, with alpha 5 due on the 3rd of September.

Human interest: Nathan Lewis over at http://newworldeconomics.com/ has (as usual I'd be tempted to say) great insights into marketing of recreational products: That Fun Stuff is not marketed, and stuff that is marketed is usually not Fun, but dressed up so it looks that way. Remember what the words of wisdom in the greek agora said? Beware the salesman. (IIRC) And with good reason. My own rule of thumb is that a good product mostly sells itself, which is why Google became a success in a world formerly dominated by Altavista, to mention one.

whois titancity.com

...created: 1999-08-25 08:42:58 UTC...

Here's to another 10 years. Cheers to you out there.

As you may know, ThePirateBay.org is, putting it mildly, facing an uncertain future, but the people behind that project has made a better alternative that is more lawyer-proof: http://openbittorrent.com/ - Go there, and help it out by sharing what useful data you have. - 2009aug12

This will be my place for essays, publication of data, bits of ranting and philosophical pocket lint for a while. It is in simple mode because I can't be bothered to make a fancy design with graphics and all that right now. (I'm still putting this shit together, don't sue me for poor design!) - peter, 2009aug09

3rd September, 2008: Blog taken offline due to some very tiresome wordpress problems. Will be offline for quite some time, check back here for updates.

This is a very nice blue color.

This is also a very nice blue color!

technology highlight (aug09):

RAM: 2 G chuncks can be had for pennies, 4 G is still pricey, but dropping. Most PCs ship with at least 2 G RAM, high-end consumer has 4 G.
HD3,5: 1 T is sweet spot, 2 T is top (about 3x price of 1 TB).
HD2,5: 250 G is sweet spot, 500 G is top (about 2x price of .5 T).
HD1,8 made market this year at size 120 G.
SSD is still around 20x the price/size of HHDs. Expect it to enter the higher-end consumer products in 2010 (and not just road warrior products as it already is).
Displays: 23 inch FullHD TFT's are almost mainstream, prices around 250$.
CPU: Dual Core is mainstream in all PC product lines except netbooks. Intel Corei7 was introduced thsi year, but haven't catched on.
GFX: Cards with 256 M memory are the baseline, 512 M is mainsteam and top-of-the line is 1 G.

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Contents: These pages are made using 90% artificial fibres, 10% miscellaneous. May cause rashes and eye irritation if if excessively exposed to collectivists.Hand-made using authentic slave labor and LINUX!!!! FUCKING LINUX!!! No animals were harmed in the making of these web pages, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced. Please recycle.

Everything here is CC Peter B. Perlsø, 2006-Big Crunch. - CC - License: You may freely copy and distribute all content here, but you may not do so for profit without my permission, and you may not remove or alter the attribution of what you copy for whatever purpose. Stuff I didn't make have been attributed to the original author.